I've been trying a lot of new recipes lately, and one of them was how to make sourdough bread, which involves growing wild yeast.What's that? It's yeast that you catch from the air and grow in a mixture of flour and water over a week. So, a little more like a science experiment than a cooking one. Pretty fun right?

My camera is still being repaired, so photos from Google.

Apparently the wild yeast in San Francisco is special either because of the vineyards nearby or the fog. One of the specialties here served along the Fisherman's Wharf is a sourdough loaf that is hollowed out to make a bowl and filled with clam chowder.

It's a pretty simple process which I got from Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall's River Cottage Everyday, but summerised, all you have to do is mix flour and warm water to a thick paint consistency, wait for it to bubble and then each day for a week, discard half the mix and add in more flour and water to maintain it's consistency. And you have yourself a 'starter', which you use more or less like commercial yeast.

I was pretty pleased since it came out tasting like it should, although I made the dough a little too watery, so it made a flat loaf. Out of curiousity, I tasted the starter directly, and it was sour enough to actually sting a bit, but it was ok after adding all the rest of the flour to make the bread. It feels kind of like when you are in primary school and you grow green beans in soggy cotton, part of the fun is watching to see what happens, but also this time you get something useful for the thrifty student's cooking arsenal. Which reminds me, maybe I should try growing some herbs at home, since they'll be fresher and cheaper in the long run, especially good for those recipes that required a tiny teaspoon of herbs and you end up buying a monster sized bunch, use a little and watch the rest wilt.